Graham Norton’s World of Wonder

At around 11:15 on Monday morning, when Manhattan was mostly empty because of the Labor Day holiday, Graham Norton, the BBC talk show host, entered the ABC Carpet & Home store on Broadway and 18th Street. Dressed in a dark green, intricately patterned Thorsun shirt and slate gray Citizens of Humanity jeans (the same outfit he had worn earlier in the day on “Good Morning America”), he had on his face the anticipatory look of a child about to run free in his favorite toy shop.

Mr. Norton, 54, first visited the store about 15 years ago, when he had just bought a two-bedroom mews house in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan. “I was doing my talk show five nights a week, and all this money was rolling in,” he said. “I went a little crazy and bought this house that I neither need nor use a lot. But I love New York.”

Soon after he bought the house, a friend brought him to this temple of luxurious bohemia to buy some sheets. “We walked in and it was just love at first sight,” he said. “This place is just amazing.”

We quickly headed up to the fifth floor, billed as “classic & timeless,” and wandered around a grouping of eclectic furnishings: some new, some old (and occasionally tattered) and all carrying hefty price tags. “That’s rather nice,” he said as he paused to look closer at a vintage love seat with pale flowered fabric faded by time and worn away in one spot, and its matching sofa.

“Oh, that’s lovely,” he said as he passed a couch by the New York furniture designer John Derian, part of a collection sold under the Cisco Brothers brand. “I like all of this. They are all quite nice.” Across the room he spotted an oddly patterned couch that he found intriguing: “It looks like it’s a repurposed denim skirt.”

But as we got closer, he fingered the fabric and said dismissively, “Oh, that would wear really badly.” A striking chair in a delicate deep blue fabric was also rejected for practical reasons: “I have dogs, so that’s not happening.”

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Mr. Norton first visited ABC Carpet & Home 15 years ago and fell in love with the store.CreditGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times

Another shopper stood and stared. “Didn’t I just see you on TV two hours ago?” he said as Mr. Norton passed.

While we moved on, Mr. Norton turned to me and said, “It’s so funny. When I walked into the ‘Good Morning America’ building this morning, there were all these people there checking my ID and asking who I was and why was I there. Then after I had been on the show, and I came back out, they all asked me to take a selfie with them. They still didn’t know who I was, but they had seen me being interviewed and they knew I was famous, and that was enough.”

Mr. Norton had been on “G.M.A.” (and would later be on “The Rachael Ray Show” and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”) to promote the United States publication of his first novel, “Holding,” a murder mystery set in a village in rural Ireland similar to the one Mr. Norton grew up in. With its tale of provincial life, gimlet-eyed spinsters and thwarted love — not to mention the discovery of a dead body — it feels almost like a Miss Marple mystery written by Colm Toibin.

Mr. Norton, who has drawn high ratings for almost 20 years, is the author of two best-selling memoirs, but this is his first novel.

Why a murder mystery?

“It’s a recognizable structure,” he said over lunch (a fried-fish sandwich and a glass of chardonnay) at ABC Cocina, where we went after he had bought a Frette duvet cover to replace the one he had bought 15 years earlier.

“You find a body. Then you find a second body. And then you go from there. And there is a reason to keep you reading. Even if it’s an awful book, you still keeping reading it to find out what happened.” (“Holding” is not an awful book. It is actually quite a good read, and received largely enthusiastic reviews when first published in Britain. It is also being made into a TV movie.)

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Mr. Norton looking at a stack of used books that have been repurposed into a decorative sculpture. Mr. Norton’s first novel, “Holding,” was published in Britain last year and recently came out in the United States.CreditGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times

The main character, P. J. Collins, a bumbling local sergeant with a serious weight problem, is an unlikely hero and an even more unlikely love interest. (Two of the other characters in the novel, both murder suspects, pursue a relationship with him.)

Sergeant Collins’s anguish over his bulk, and his constant rebukes to himself about how much he eats, feel awfully close to the bone, as it were. Was Mr. Norton fat as a child? “Mentally, yes,” he said. “I think everyone has a very dysfunctional relationship with food.”

But he said he was determined that P. J. not lose weight, as part of a happy ending: "That was not going to be his story.”

He added, “I have a very overweight friend, and she read the book. And I know she read it, because she texted me, 'Have your book. Reading it!' And she has never mentioned it again. And I have never mentioned it again. And I wonder if that’s the reason — because I’m describing a world that she knows very well and that she assumes I do not. But who knows? Maybe she just hated the book.”

The genesis of the plot came from a story his mother told him about an abandoned house in the Irish town of his youth, and the three unmarried sisters who lived there. “To be honest, to do that story justice, the book would have had to have been an almost ‘Remains of the Day’ kind of thing,” Mr. Norton said. “But I didn’t have the skill set to do that. So I decided to kill someone and turn it into a murder mystery.”

That was not Mr. Norton’s most famous brush with the tabloid press, however. A few years ago, an ex-boyfriend gave an interview to a British newspaper in which he said that the two broke up because Mr. Norton “could drink up to four bottles of wine in an evening” and seemed to care more about his two dogs than him.

“That’s probably the only real kiss-and-tell I’ve been involved in; it was something, to feel really betrayed,” he said. “What’s good, of course, is that it makes you feel a lot better about the breakup. And the odd thing was, in Britain, it was almost like I planted that story, because of the amazing amount of good press I got from it. ‘Yeah, I like to drink and I like dogs.’ Those happen to be two very important things to the British people.”

Mr. Norton is now single and lives in an apartment in the Wapping neighborhood of London with Bailey, a Labradoodle and Madge, a terrier. (“The shelter named her Madonna, but I thought, ‘I can’t have a dog named Madonna,’ and so I changed it to Madge.”)

He seems content with that arrangement. “The reality is that, as you get older, the more fussy you become,” he said. “But the older you get, the less right you have to be fussy.” Or as he told one interviewer: “I would prefer to live alone than with towels that are folded incorrectly.”

Having caught the fiction bug, he is now working on his second novel — “a mystery, but not a murder mystery.”

But as our earlier stroll through the store suggested, maybe being an author isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For there, in the middle of the fourth-floor showroom, was a towering stack of used books, perhaps 300 in all, repurposed into a piece of decorative sculpture for someone with a high-ceilinged living room.

“That’s a lesson for any author,” Mr. Norton said. “You put all that effort into what you think is your life’s work, and it ends up as part of a decorative pillar in a furniture shop.”